Goodman struggled out of a difficult childhood. His father died in a taxicab accident when he was young, leaving him to support his widowed mother and eleven siblings. He served his apprenticeship, at age eleven, in a local theater pit band, then in a fivepiece orchestra on a Lake Michigan steamer, then, in the early 1920s, with Jules Herbuveaux, who had a well-known Chicago-area band. Goodman spent the 1920s moving from one coast to the other: first Los Angeles, where in 1925 he joined Ben Pollack and his orchestra at the Venice Ballroom, leaving for short stints with Benny Krueger and Isham Jones. He finally left Pollack for good in 1929 to play with Red Nichols until 1931, after which he spent the next three years doing freelance work. Goodman was twenty-five when, in 1934, he formed his own orchestra in New York, using a library of arrangements written...